“Black Acid Co-op” is part of the tradition of transformative environmental artworks that fill or otherwise obliterate the spaces containing them. Among its points of origin are “Plein” (“Full Up”),” from 1960, in which the French artist Arman filled the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris with carefully sifted (nonorganic) trash; the eerie environments redolent of communal Moscow apartments with which the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov first made his name in the West in the 1980s; Jason Rhodes’s idiosyncratic massings of objects and material goods; and Gregor Schneider’s labyrinthine reconstruction of the interior of his parents’ home, near Cologne, Germany, inside the German Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale.

New York, NY, April 30, 2009 - David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Slough, a group exhibition curated by gallery artist Steve DiBenedetto.

The impetus behind this exhibition is the flexibility of the word slough, which has various interpretations. When pronounced slew, slough can describe a bog-like, swampy, dark, primordial and somewhat mysterious realm. The alternate and less used, but maybe also appropriate interpretation, is a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection that one cannot extract oneself from. Slough, as in sluff, also refers to that which has been cast aside or shed off, like a skin. It can also describe the manner in which material tends to accumulate at the edges of a performed task, such as the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.

Either way these notions in a very general sense will be used as the stimulus to explore ideas about marginal territory, accumulation, holes and residue. Some works will have a more obvious connection to these conditions (i.e., Larry Poons, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Tony Feher), while other works might be a little more unexpectedly related (i.e., Jessica Craig Martin, Philip Taaffe, and Hanneline Rogeberg).

A certain dynamic at work will be the inclusion of things that may not even be apparent as art at first, coexisting with virtual masterpieces of traditional forms. The works, which represent a highly diverse range of mediums, from established 20th century masters to cutting edge contemporary artists, will associate with various states of deterioration and repair, forging unusual and unforeseen connections between old and new work.

While not an exact follow-up to DiBenedetto's last curatorial effort, Loaf (2000), which involved sculpture exclusively, Slough will bring back some of the same artists.